Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

yasoob.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#61

Post by photochemsyn »

ketralnis wrote: post #24
realusername wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't understand who thought it would be a good idea to disable screenshots... Android is becoming worse every year.

For users, yeah there's no reason to disable screenshots or any other functionality that a user might want to do on their own hardware that they bought and morally should be in control of. But for app developers there are a lot of reasons they might want to do that. Disappearing messaging apps like Snapchat, ticket QR code displaying apps, stock footage apps, ebooks, and more. It's just that Google has decided that t…

This is why you need two smartphones, so you can use one to take a picture of the screen of the other... helps drive revenue for the industry.

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#62

Post by baby »

noisem4ker wrote: post #35
baby wrote: post #20

Back in the days you would just lose all your message history anyway with text / AOL / MSN / facebook messenger / others… so I just started accepting it as a fact of life that you can’t keep your messaging history forever.

MSN/Live Messenger automatically saved chat histories as nice XML files in the user's documents directory, along with received files, so no real effort had to be made for preservation. As for SMS texts, they could be backed up at least on later Symbian OSs, with the Nokia Ovi desktop app. On Android, backup apps would be able to do it as well. At least in theory, EU directives for data portability (the "takeout" feat…

Facebook messages are definitely lost. I downloaded backups and lots of messages have disappeared. Maybe not a problem anymore though.

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#63

Post by rosndo »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #58
scrlk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Apple are selling iPhones with 1TB of storage these days, you'd expect them to test the ability to import huge libraries. (even if the 13 Pro still uses USB 2.0 so the transfer speeds would be abysmal)

My iPhone 7 supports sync over WiFi. I've never benchmarked it, but I'd expect the speed to be better than USB 2.

Only if you want to use iCloud, no? Or maybe I just wasn’t able to use that at the time because I was on hotel WiFi.

Are new iPhones really doing usb 2 over usb-c?

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#64

Post by jeromegv »

yunohn wrote: post #31
rosndo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they improved that? Last I tried with 200GB or so of photos it just froze.

Most people aren’t importing 200GB of photos from their iPhone in one go…

If you started on iOS in 2010 and kept all your photos, this is hardly an edge case. People take a crazy amount of photos nowadays, definitely not unique to photographers.

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#66

Post by annadane »

ksec wrote: post #57

Extracting isn't the hard part. I have yet to figure out how to append Whatsapp message from a previous backup which I have held for 8 years. The iOS backup was corrupted and I had to start over again at the time. The Whatsapp file was extracted but I never got round to it. ( Along with important pictures inside the Whatsapp) To this day I still blame on it on iOS backup problem. Which is still a thing in 2022. I won…

Because Whatsapp was bought to eliminate the competition. There is no quality control, it's by design

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#67

Post by user_7832 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #61
ketralnis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For users, yeah there's no reason to disable screenshots or any other functionality that a user might want to do on their own hardware that they bought and morally should be in control of. But for app developers there are a lot of reasons they might want to do that. Disappearing messaging apps like Snapchat, ticket QR code displaying apps, stock footage apps, ebooks, and more. It's just that Google has decided that t…

This is why you need two smartphones, so you can use one to take a picture of the screen of the other... helps drive revenue for the industry.

This analogue loophole really makes me realize that if you need to stop a screenshot/screen recording for security/whatever, you've got a design problem. And this is specifically applicable to services like Netflix.

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#68

Post by vladvasiliu »

rosndo wrote: post #63
vladvasiliu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPhone 7 supports sync over WiFi. I've never benchmarked it, but I'd expect the speed to be better than USB 2.

Only if you want to use iCloud, no? Or maybe I just wasn’t able to use that at the time because I was on hotel WiFi. Are new iPhones really doing usb 2 over usb-c?

I don't think it was using iCloud. It would show up in iTunes (haven't used my Mac much since iTunes got split up) and I could drag files around from some applications and back it up to my local drive (in addition to the iCloud backups).

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#69

Post by lxgr »

realusername wrote: post #14
Gigachad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days of android being free and open are long gone. Now there are several aspects of android that are more locked down than iOS. For example android has an api which allows disabling the screenshot feature. While iOS only allows apps to listen for when a screenshot has happened.

I also don't understand who thought it would be a good idea to disable screenshots... Android is becoming worse every year.

The technical background is that Android allows marking certain GUI surfaces as "sensitive", which increases their in-memory protection somewhat (not sure to what extent) and also makes them inaccessible to various remote screen recording/capturing solutions, including adb.

Not being able to take a screenshot is more of a side effect of that, but is arguably the main reason for most apps to use them in practice.

It's also been around for many years.

Re: Extracting WhatsApp Messages from an iOS Backup

#70

Post by password4321 »

Fnoord wrote: post #59

My setup (following Schneier's essay 'data is a toxic asset') is as follows: 1 week self-destructing messages in Signal (I don't use WhatsApp). If its an important message I save it (can't remember the last time that happened), if its an important picture I save it (which then gets uploaded to Nextcloud, which gets backed up to a Synology elsewhere, and it gets deleted from my smartphone but available via Nextcloud;…

> the only data there automagically gets removed within a week

Nice! To be clear, you can't count on the same thing happening on the other end of the connection due to various alternative Signal clients. This is kind of where Snapchat is king of the hill, but obviously nothing is perfect!

Post reply on HN